Kin-dza-dza!
March 30, 2026
Presented by Grand Illusion Cinema
In honor of their 22nd anniversary as a volunteer-operated non-profit, Grand Illusion is screening a movie that is very much their bag: the wonderfully weird, recently restored cult classic, Kin-dza-dza!. Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa Solaris directing Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and you’ll come close to the existential strangeness of this delightfully loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary.
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SIFF year-round passes and vouchers are not valid for this screening.
Two average Muscovites – a plainspoken construction foreman and a Georgian violin student – encounter an odd man on the street who asks, “Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?” In a flash, they’re teleported across the universe to the planet Pluke in the Kin–Dza–Dza galaxy – a Tatooine-like desert world whose inhabitants are hilariously non-communicative (their main words are “ku” for good and “kyu” for very bad) and where common wooden matches are tremendously valuable.
A deadpan, absurdist mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, and Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune, where alien cultures are even more haphazard and WTF than our own; the film is also a savage satire of bureaucratic idiocy and dysfunction no matter what political system you’re living under – or what planet you’re living on.
“…possibly the most underrated science fiction film of the past 50 years.” — Joel Blackledge, Little White Lies
“Bittersweet satire posing as postapocalyptic science fiction, Georgiy Daneliya’s Kin-dza-dza! has as much to say about today as it does the last gasps of the Soviet Union.” — Budd Wilkins, Slant
- Director: Georgiy Daneliya
- Principal Cast: Stanislav Lyubshin, Evgeni Leonov, Yuriy Yakovlev, Lev Perfilov, Irina Shmeleva
- Country: Soviet Union
- Year: 1986
- Running Time: 135 min.
- Language: Russian w/ English subtitles
- Has Subtitles: Yes